My father brings me to a diamond mine by the highway where the hills grow giant looming lacy things, daisies. A house grey as cloud shudders at the back edge of an overgrown field. My father parks the car. We knew no one would come. Approach the house. Who doesn’t love slatted, weathered things? An entrance that poses a question? I smile at the man guarding the door. My father goes in and disappears. I clack my teeth, the guard jumps. I rest my face on his chest, inhale with big lungs: chalk, powder. The scent of earwax; that smell individual as a fingerprint, or semen. I enter. Piss, the stench of it, everywhere. My father nowhere in sight. Men yawning on couches, evicting flies from their mouths. A man smoking a Belmont emerges from a hallway, tells me his name is George. I ask, You from Toronto? He says, How did you know? Your smokes, bud. Your smokes. Well, says George. Wait till you find out about diamonds. Create a new emotion down there. Plumb it. The mine’s entrance—the root of the house—leads downwards past a deadbolt. I slip it open with my power. A cold room. Cedar. The mine is a cellar, there are no diamonds in boxes, no diamonds glittering on walls or necks, and all I see are rich men talking, and my father.
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Margo LaPierre (www.margolapierreeditor.com) is a queer, bipolar Canadian poet and editor. Her debut collection, Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes, was published by Guernica Editions in 2017. She is newsletter editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, membership chair of the Editors Canada Ottawa-Gatineau branch, member of poetry collective VII, and a poetry selector for Bywords.ca. She is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in the Temz Review, Room Magazine, filling Station, CAROUSEL, PRISM, Train Journal, and others. She lives in Ottawa. @margolapierre
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image: Lindsay Hargrave
Rejection Letters 